What if the most effective way to challenge gender inequality wasn’t a workshop – but living it? Green Forum, together with Malagasy civil society organisations and gender equality experts, created an experiment to do exactly that: the Gender Reversed Bootcamp.

The Intervention

You cannot “PowerPoint” your way out of patriarchy, as it turns out.

In August 2022, Green Forum supported young adults developing a youth wing for a Malagasy political party. Together with “Women Break the Silence” and “Women Brigades”, we ran the Gender Reversed Bootcamp with 19 participants – an intense, eye-opening week.

The Gender Reversed Bootcamp was a one-week experiment in which participants stepped into reversed gender roles. Men took on domestic work and caregiving, while women assumed power, control and resource management roles. Every rule was drawn from national statistics on Madagascar: the 30–50% pay gap, the unpaid care work, the economic dependence – all mapped directly onto the experience of male participants. Each constraint imposed on male participants corresponded to a documented reality for women in the context where the camp took place.

Lasting Changes

By the end of the camp, participants described the experience as something that had genuinely shifted how they saw the world – not just intellectually, but also in their bodies.

That shift quickly extended beyond the camp itself. When participants encountered a situation involving gender-based violence in their community shortly after returning, they drew on what they had learned to advocate for structural change – leading to the creation of a whistleblower protection policy and anti-gender-based violence measures in the party regulations. During the camp itself, they also developed a proposal for legal reforms, including LGBTQI+ inclusion.

A follow-up in early 2026 – four years on – found the impact still very much alive. One male participant now intervenes when men interrupt women in his association’s meetings. One female participant, now working in diplomacy, draws on narratives from the bootcamp to assert authority in high-level international negotiations.

Learn More

To learn more about the research behind the Gender Reversed Bootcamp, read the article by Dr Ludovic Garattini published by the European Network of Political Foundations (ENoP).

This project story was first published in 2023 and updated in October 2026 with findings from the four-year follow-up.